Blog

Opioid abuse and dependency is ravaging individuals, families, and communities in the United States. In response to this epidemic, OHSU Department of Family Medicine and OCHIN are beginning work on a five-year National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded project named EPICENTER. The project is designed to fill in critical gaps of knowledge around chronic opioid prescribing, misuse, outcomes, and associated community characteristics for safety net patients and clinics.

Care Everywhere Referrals Management (CERM) is a closed loop Epic-to-Epic referral solution that accelerates and streamlines the referral process. OCHIN has made it a strategic priority, to implement CERM with as many Epic partners as possible. Since this spring, OCHIN has made great strides toward meeting this goal.

In partnership with Care Everywhere Regional User Groups in California and Oregon, OCHIN is participating in setting statewide standards for CERM implementation.

In May of 2018, OCHIN unveiled the Epic Eligibility Assistance Tool—a tool designed to help clinics report annual insurance assists to HRSA as part of Uniform Data System (UDS) requirements. What follows is a story of collaboration, demonstrating that often the lessons learned in the development of OCHIN tools are just as important as the tools themselves.

Early this week, Senate and House leaders agreed upon an amended opioid package to improve the health care response to this crisis ravaging our country. While OCHIN applauds the advancement of this pivotal bill, we are gravely disappointed with the omission of H.R.6082, the Overdose Prevention and Patient Safety (OPPS) Act.

With support from the HCCN award, OCHIN built a methodology to better support health centers across the performance continuum to deliver the highest quality of care to the greatest number of vulnerable patients. We identified a shared definition of performance and are using it to understand key attributes that drive success, so that we can spread learnings, and increase performance of the collaborative.

OCHIN is hard at work on our 10.2 release of custom EHR templates for our Planned Parenthood customers. This release will be made available for affiliates using our custom EHR templates by the end of November. We will be conducting our first demonstration of our work in progress for Planned Parenthood affiliates on Friday, September 14.